US judge dismisses lawsuit by Palestinian Americans trapped in Gaza

A federal judge dismisses a lawsuit demanding that the US government conduct emergency rescues of Palestinian Americans and family members who are trapped in Gaza and trying to escape hardships caused by the war between Israel and Hamas.

Chief Judge Virginia Kendall of the US District Court in Chicago says she lacks the power and tools to evaluate “delicate foreign policy decisions” belonging to the government’s Executive Branch, while expressing sympathy with “the impossible positions in which many of the plaintiffs have found themselves.”

Nine Palestinian Americans, all US citizens or lawful permanent residents, sued in December 2024, accusing the US government of violating their constitutional right to equal protection by abandoning them in a war zone and not evacuating them as readily as it would evacuate other Americans.

They said destroyed homes, food shortages, poor medical care, mental anguish and other hardships imposed a “mandatory, non-discretionary duty” on the government to evacuate people from Gaza.

But the judge says she is ill-equipped to address how to coordinate an evacuation with neighboring countries, how to shepherd evacuees through dangerous “red zones,” which people are eligible for evacuations, and how the nonexistent US diplomatic presence in Gaza would complicate the process.

“Endeavoring to answer these questions – and many more like them – from the comfort of chambers is both undoable and would also invade the political branches’ constitutionally committed tasks of determining when, how, and under what circumstances evacuations from war zones should proceed,” Kendall writes.

The judge also says available evidence shows the US government has developed an evacuation plan, and the nine plaintiffs had either been evacuated or rejected offers that did not cover immediate family members.

Lawyers from the Council on American-Islamic Relations advocacy group, which represents the plaintiffs, has no immediate comment. The US Department of State does not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The lawsuit was filed against former US president Joe Biden, former secretary of state Antony Blinken and former defense secretary Lloyd Austin, and continued against their respective successors Donald Trump, Marco Rubio and Pete Hegseth.